Tip Your Dealer

On Saturday morning I am having iced coffee with Maltese Mario, the freelance urban psychopharmacologist. He looks like shit.

“I need a holiday”, he says, and takes a swig of terrible coffee chain espresso.

Maltese Mario is exhausted because it’s music festival season, and he is the freelance urban psychopharmacologist of choice for all kinds of Dutch and German ravers who come to Prague, Ostrava, Slovakia and Hungary and prefer their fun to be chemically contingent.

He is also an amateur BDSM dungeon master, which I didn’t know about until just now.

“It’s out of control. It used to be fun, I remember, having fun. But now all I hear is oh please yes cover my mouth with tape, like-a dis”, he mimics covering his own mouth with an invisible strap of tape, “and gag me like-a dis and give me pain, more pain, more more pain. But what about fuck? Nobody wants to fuck!”

I nod.

“Seriously. They come for the pain. I give them the pain. For hours and hours and hours, and then I want to get off but they don’t care about sex. They just want the pain”.

Underneath all that amateur BDSM dungeon master facade, Maltese Mario is just a boy, standing in front of another boy — or possibly hovering over him with some sort of whip — asking him to fuck.

“But if they are masochists, perhaps you could just refuse to keep hurting them? Presumably that would hurt their feelings, which they actually love”, I venture to suggest.

There’s an enormously obese man sitting across the table from a burka. The man is thumbing through a tourist guide to Prague.

Maltese Mario announces that he’s going on a holiday back to Malta, where he will see his mom, veg out by the beach, and not fist anyone.